Part 11

In every school house there are palæolithic children, neolithic children, bronze age children, iron age children, children of the golden age, children of a thousand different aptitudes and limitations. The mussed up condition of our educational program, the incoherent wrangling about educational theory, is largely due to our failure to keep this steadily in mind. Somehow we have not fully appreciated the fact that endowment is more than training, and we are still hoping that in some way we can perform the miracle and carry the neolithic child on our shoulders across the ten thousand, or possibly the fifty thousand, years that intervene between him and abstract thought. And because we have wished to do the greater miracle, we have failed to do the lesser one that makes for the slow but sure growth of the race. It is not strange that a cry has gone up for vocational training. It is strange, however, that we did not foresee this just demand, and meet it even before the demand was made. At the present moment there is danger that the interests of the more gifted child will be sacrificed to meet the need of the less gifted one, that our whole public school system will be Garyized, and that the proper foundation of our higher education will be impaired if not destroyed. In a neighboring state a year or two ago, the state superintendent of education sent out notes to the smaller high schools advising that courses in domestic science and agriculture be substituted for geometry and Virgil. It did not occur to him that he could establish a lower form of education without destroying a higher form. It did not occur to him that the state was rich enough to pay for both forms. Many years ago I lived near a rich stock-man who owned the finest herd of shorthorn cattle in the Middle West. He paid a man $2,000 a year to care for his cattle; he sent his children to a school where no teacher received more than five hundred dollars a year. I will not say that he cared four times as much for his cattle as for his children, but I will say that we have here the solution of our problem. If we would spend four times as much money on our elementary schools, vocational and industrial courses could be properly established, classes could be reduced from fifty to fifteen, the needs of each pupil could be carefully studied, the pupil of lesser gifts could be directed into industrial courses without humiliation, and the pupil of higher gifts would make his way normally and naturally to geometry and Virgil.

In one year of the war we are spending twenty billion dollars. The interest on this vast sum at four per cent. is eight hundred million dollars a year,--or just fifty millions more than we spent on all forms of education last year in the United States. We are willing to spend this amount of money to make the world safe for democracy. Are we willing to spend a similar sum to put real meaning and content into the word democracy? It is conceivable that during the war we may become so accustomed to giving and tax-paying that after the war we may be willing to make similar sacrifices that democracy may have a fair chance to bear its true and legitimate fruits. In the first year of the war Mr. Rockefeller has given to the Red Cross and other philanthropic causes $70,000,000. He has done this with immense satisfaction, and without serious inconvenience. It is to be hoped that during the war he and our twenty-two thousand other millionaires may become so accustomed to paying income taxes that it may degenerate into a habit, and that after the war, from this source our funds for education may be doubled or trebled. Mr. Rockefeller should be financing not merely Mr. Flexner's experiment station in secondary education; he should be financing a hundred other secondary schools in an equally splendid way. But we can never hope to make our educational program really significant, merely by compelling the millionaires to pay their rightful share of the expense. We shall never succeed in this program, until we have become sufficiently interested in the matter to be willing to make sacrifices ourselves. It is with extreme regret that I am compelled to admit that the heart of this great problem is economic, and that the streets of the New Jerusalem we are striving to build, must be not metaphorically, but literally paved with gold.

If we can assume that after the war industrial education will be properly established and financed without diverting funds from the higher forms of education, if we can even assume that the funds available for the more humanistic training will be greatly increased, there still remain two potent forces in our educational world which seriously threaten to undermine and impair our democracy and the humanism which is its eventual goal. I refer to the corrupting influence of athletics in our high schools and colleges, and the attitude of the state towards the small college.

One can hardly "see life steadily and see it whole" without recognizing the fact that it is necessary to house a sound mind in a sound body; but after all, the supreme thing is the sound mind. If our school and college athletics had been willing to make this its chief objective, little or nothing could be said in arraignment of athletic contests. But the present athletic situation makes one ready to cry aloud that ancient indictment found in a fragment of the Autolycus of Euripides: "Of all the countless ills that prey on Hellas, there is none that can be compared with this tribe of athletes."

Since athletics have been introduced into the public high schools of the Middle West, there is no question that a somewhat larger number of boys have continued in the high schools. There is also no question that there has been a very marked lowering of intellectual standards. And what is worse, our high school students and whole communities have been imbued with a false sense of proportion. To run half as fast as a greyhound, to jump one-fifth as far as a kangaroo, to kick one-tenth as hard as a Missouri mule, these are the principal things, these are the weightier matters of the law. These contests with the brute world, in which we are always defeated, have taken the place of the higher intellectual contests of humanism. The school superintendent or principal who can turn out a winning team, he is the man, the new patriot in our democracy. Let me illustrate. Three years ago in one of the small towns of Iowa, the superintendent of schools received a considerable increase in salary because he had turned out a basket ball team that had defeated all the teams in the neighboring high schools. The next fall four members of the winning team entered the State University of Iowa as freshmen. Before the end of the year they had all been sent home because they could not do their intellectual tasks.

But to turn to a second menace to humanism--the attitude of the state towards the small college, or perhaps it would be truer to say the attitude of the administrative officials of our state institutions towards the small college. A conversation which I had last summer with the dean of the college of liberal arts in one of our state universities, will illustrate what I mean. In this conversation the dean expressed the opinion that the great majority of small colleges in the Middle West would be reduced to junior colleges (i. e. their work would be limited to the freshman and sophomore years), or meet with entire extinction. He was even more specific in his prophecy, saying that five per cent. of the colleges of the type of College X would die or become junior colleges during the war (if the war lasted three years) because of the reduced income from tuition, and reduced financial assistance from private gifts. He made this prophecy with a smile, as one heralding a blessing. For the moment he forgot that a majority of the students in his graduate school came from colleges of the same class as College X, and he failed to foresee that if his prophecy were fulfilled, large sections of the state would be left in educational darkness. Now College X has had an honorable history of forty-five years. It has done much to make democracy safe for the world. It has sent out hundreds of graduates and ex-students fit to participate in self-government, and with some notion of what is meant by an international mind. At the present moment it counts among its alumni one hundred and forty-two who are engaged in teaching, including one university president who administers $18,000,000 for educational purposes, and twenty-five college professors in such institutions as Beloit, Drury, Dupauw, Lawrence, Grinnell. Many others of its alumni, on their way to law, medicine, theology, have served the state effectively as teachers. And yet the dean would brush aside this work with a smile, would allow this college and similar colleges to die or be reduced to junior colleges, without a word of protest, perhaps in the thought that his own college of liberal arts would minister adequately to the educational needs of the state. In that state at the present moment privately endowed institutions are caring for more than twenty thousand students, and are making an annual gift to the state of more than three million dollars. These institutions are well scattered, and reach localities untouched by the university. Higher education must be carried to the various communities. The number of young people that can be sent to college is increased fivefold, if those young people can be housed and boarded at home, and if there is no railroad fare to pay. To illustrate: the county in which the state university in question is located, sends seven hundred and eighty-nine students to the university, more than the total number sent by sixty-three counties in remote corners of the state. Out of five hundred degrees conferred by the university in one year, one-fifth go to students residing in the county in which the university is situated. It is obvious that the university is bringing higher education to one county, and failing to bring it to sixty-three counties. The work however is being done by the small colleges. But the dean was right when he intimated that many of these small colleges are fighting for their lives. Twenty-five years ago the professors in College X were receiving $1,500 a year,--a home missionary's salary even in those days; but to-day they are still getting $1,500. Last year a deficit made a considerable inroad on the endowment fund. This year the deficit will be larger, because seventy of her advanced students have gone into the army. And the state stands by in indifference, watching an institution die that has served it well for forty-five years--an institution that it must replace at public expense, or leave a corner of the state in educational darkness. I think that the real hope of the dean was that such colleges might be reduced to junior colleges, and that the available funds might be spent in improving the instruction in the freshmen and sophomore years. But he could hardly say this, for last year the students in his own university were loudly protesting that they were being neglected, and that teaching had been sacrificed on the altar of research. But even if the dean could not say it, why is it not a reasonable suggestion? Why not cut off the last two years of the college course and improve the instruction in the earlier years? For the simple reason that the state is too rich to permit of any curtailment of the opportunity of intellectual growth for its young people. It is gratuitous assumption that the students who had done two years' work in the small college would complete their work in the university. The small minority who are going into professional work would do this, but the large majority would end their training with the sophomore year, and democracy and humanism would suffer simultaneously an irremediable blow. Let us hope that the historians of later times will not be compelled to write: "In 1917 the Kaiser not only blew up the cathedrals in France, but he also helped to dynamite our American colleges."

There is an old proverb to the effect that the streets of Jerusalem were kept clean by every man sweeping that part which lay before his own door. On one side of our domain runs the Lincoln Highway, on the other side the road which began before the altar of Prometheus in the groves of Academe. Both of these roads later converge in that straight and narrow path that leads unto life. It is our high function to keep these roads free and unobstructed--to walk a few parasangs with gifted young people; to fit them to be effective ambassadors of Truth, by persuading them to thumb a Latin lexicon until they have attained a reasonable precision of speech; to help them attain the refinement of diction that shall eventually result in a greater refinement of character; to teach them to appreciate the beauty of a Greek temple or of a fragment of Greek sculpture, furnishing them with a basis of æsthetic judgment, that will serve them well until they meet Plato's archetypes face to face; to feed their imagination with the radiant buoyant life of Homer; to show them how Horace fashioned a livable life philosophy out of the _aurea mediocritas_ of Aristotle; to initiate them into the Socratic doctrine that Knowledge is the mother of all the virtues; to crown them with a universal sympathy by interpreting with them the "_Lachryma rerum_" of Virgil. Can anyone conceive a life in which pleasure and duty are more inextricably intermingled?

This is the humanism that is the fairest fruit of democracy, and which in turn makes democracy possible. Two years ago I heard one of our most eminent political economists say in a public address that the chance of success for a democratic form of government was in direct proportion to the number of citizens who were capable of abstract thought. We do our abstract thinking in the main through the help of Greek and Latin derivatives. Let us not underestimate, and let us not permit anyone else to underestimate, the importance of our contribution to the success of democracy, when we train our students to a certain precision in the use of Greek and Latin derivatives, by long years of patient drill in careful translation. It is our privilege to help develop their latent powers of abstract thought by furnishing them with the tools with which they may do their thinking. This is the largest single contribution we can make to human life, the largest single offering we can lay on the altar of Truth.

Our success in holding ourselves and our students to this great task will be determined largely by the set of life values we carry into the class room, and by our ability to differentiate that which is important in Greek and Roman civilization from that which is negligible and unessential. I sometimes fear that we have forgotten that only the higher elements of any civilization are worthy to be transmitted to posterity, and that forgetting this we have permitted many of our courses to be denaturized, dehumanized, and Germanized.

In seven out of ten of the text-books of the classics edited for college use, the notes are written, not for freshmen and sophomores, but for those who have already attained or are going to attain the degree of doctor of philosophy, a degree that was first made in Germany. This blight of the doctor's degree has invaded not only our courses in the classics, but every course in the university curriculum that can in any sense be called a humanistic course. It is high time that we form a solemn procession and make an offering on the altar of Robigo, god or goddess of the rust.

In the natural and physical sciences we do not resent or criticize futile experimentation. We are willing that that six hundred and five futile experiments may be made that the six hundred and sixth may be successful. We expect this work of experimentation to be more or less dehumanizing, in its drudgery, that in the end the fruit of the successful experiment may confer some blessing upon the human family. We do not protest against a doctor's dissertation in science in which the results are wholly negative. But we do protest against a doctor's dissertation in literature or history, which has compelled the _doctor designatus_ to spend months of his time on some inconsequential subject, giving him a false perspective and a false sense of proportion that it will take him years to get rid of in his teaching.

Let it be understood that this protest against the doctor's degree is not a protest against the length of time that is given to graduate studies in preparation for teaching. This should be increased rather than diminished. It is a protest against some of the objects to which years of graduate study have been devoted under the shadow of the doctor's degree. It is "a place in the sun" that we are demanding. In using this phrase "a place in the sun," I am not plagiarizing that one whom Henry Van Dyke has christened "the damned vulture of Potsdam," but a far better man, Diogenes of Sinope, who once requested Alexander the Great to get out of his daylight and give him his place in the sun.

In conclusion let me cite an incident from the life of Zeno, the founder of Stoicism. It is related that Zeno once asked the oracle what he ought to do to live in the most excellent way. The reply came back that he ought to become of the same complexion as the dead. Whereupon he immediately inferred that he ought to apply himself to reading the books of the ancients. This is the Zeno who promulgated the doctrines of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, who fashioned the molds in which the Roman Law and Roman Christianity were cast, who conceived of a world democracy in which friendship should be the guiding principle, and in which Greek and barbarian alike should have equal privileges and equal opportunities for growth.

THE MODERN MEDICINE MAN

Medicine, like other natural phenomena tends to the cyclic. Having passed safely through the drug period of evolution, both allopathic and homeopathic, into the no-drug state of so-called "preventive medicine" which has nothing to do with medicine as the word is commonly understood, this ancient mystery of the cure of bodies is now reunited to its equally ancient but long alienated mate the cure of souls, and this bewildered generation is confronted with the amazing spectacle of the lion of science and the lamb of religion lying down together. Whether the ultimate resting place of the lamb will be inside the lion is not yet disclosed to the anxious and inquiring mind. Again the priest and the physician are combined in one person, and we see before us the modern counterpart of the antique medicine man who exorcised the devils that possessed and tormented the soul and the body, and by sorcery and incantations treated impartially diseases of the spirit and of the flesh. Again the accepted cure for blindness is to "go and sin no more."

It is especially that borderland where soul and body meet and fuse in what a recent treatise on the diseases of the nervous system calls "the psychic or symbolic system" that the modern medicine man takes as his province. In this No Man's Land he is master of all he surveys, and his sextant comprises the universe in its angle.

We are prone to think of diseases of the mind as a specialty of modern life. But the briefest review of history would indicate that these symptoms of maladjustment to the environment have been evident from the earliest times. Adam and Eve are said to have developed "paranoiac delusions of persecution," a kind of _manie à deux_, accompanied by hallucinations of vision described as "seeing snakes." Their elder son was afflicted with a "homicidal mania," while the younger was apparently a case of "constitutional inferiority." Noah was a well recognized "alcoholic," Job was subject to severe "depressions," Nebuchadnezzar exhibited "praecox dilapidations of conduct" and Saul was a pronounced "manic-depressive." The Bible contains many edifying and well worked-out case histories with prescriptions for the treatment of such difficulties. It was Isaiah who outlined the newer method when he said, on the highest authority, "Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow."

It was perhaps through dwelling on his own race history and literature that the newest prophet in Israel, the famous, to some infamous, Viennese professor, Sigmund Freud, came to invent the latest prophylaxis for mental disorders, now widely known under the name of psychoanalysis, at present the best recognized specific for many mental disorders, and particularly for those orgies and "hang-overs" of the soul, the "manic-depressive psychosis."

This is the chief of the new designations for one of the old diseases, the failing reserved for the especially refined and subtle mind, the form of complex developed most frequently in the most delicate psychological machinery. This psychosis is the protest of the winged spirit against the humdrum dead levels of the main-traveled roads, a near relation to the "hysteric" refuge of the æsthetic nature from the vulgarities of everyday life, the "præcox" preference for childhood's happy hour, and the "paranoiac" escape from the banalities of a society composed too exclusively of well-meaning, friendly but unbearably tiresome folk. All these phenomena are but the outbreak of the higher nature, the reaction of the superman, that creature of light and air, to the dullness and dreariness of this underworld, in which the chrysalis drags out its drab and worm-like existence before the emergence of the butterfly.

In view, however, of the stubborn fact that the superman must continue to exist (unless indeed non-existence is the state preferred) in a world made up largely of subnormal, or even more deadly normal beings, the overbred and super-sensitive must seek some form of reconciliation to the fundamental absurdities that pass for real life, must even submit to something in the nature of a "cure" for the disease of superevolution, some esoteric bloodletting process as it were, in order to restrain the impulse to skip like a lamb in the sun on the hillside, and confine the gait to an anemic crawl along the narrow path of the commonplace.

Psychoanalysis appears to be the "indicated" treatment for these adjustment difficulties, and it is the purpose of this article to suggest to the as yet uninitiated some of the novel features in the mechanism of this psychotherapy, and to offer a few reflections thereon.

To assume the greater ease of the first person singular, I should perhaps say in passing, or by way of apology, that if I appear somewhat unduly and indecently personal in my observations on the new psychology, it is a habit fastened upon me by a half year of indulgence in an orgy of such voluble self discussion and analysis as I had previously fondly fancied to exist only in young ladies' boarding schools. Figure to yourself, if you can, the inevitable result of conversing about your "soul," and unburdening all its secrets and reserves in tri-weekly sessions with an inquisitive stranger! The process is a throw-back to those unsophisticated days when the Knight of La Mancha and a group of other romantics, met for the first time by accident in a country inn, whiled away the long evening in the unrestrained and interminable narrations of their lives and loves, complacently revealing to one anothers' sympathetic and, one would imagine, sometimes startled gaze, the secret springs of their existence.